Most users might not have noticed a whole lot, but there has been a very large amount of spam bots attempting to post. However because this forum requires post approval before they are visible to the public at large most users will not have noticed this.

However it has created an issue for us mods and admins. Those posts are visible to us because of our role for approving them. This has been an issue for over 2 years now. Today, I've decided that a large action must be conducted to clear out this spam.

There is a chance some legit users got caught up in this. If you joined recently and noticed your account no longer exists, please recreate the account and repost any posts you attempted to post while still a newly registered users. If you're not posting spam, we should be able to get to it in a timely manner. Before I had to do this it was very difficult to sift through the pages upon pages of spam posts awaiting approval in the mod control panel so there would be long delays to getting a post/thread approved. Hopefully this remedies that situation for awhile. I'm sure spam bots will continue to try and post. I'll check back to the forums and purge the newly users group once every 6 months or so. That is if I can remember to do that.

To other mods (and fo0k as well the board's main admin), I purged the group using the prune user feature. Only I limited it to users with zero posts and a date created after September 2014 (although if you decide to do it the same way I did, you'd be targeting a date after today). I noticed alot of the newly registered user group had really old accounts so that's where I had it start. Now that the mess is cleaned out, it should be easier to prune out spam bots without having to risk hitting legit accounts as often.

Note that this action only impacted users in the "Newly Registered User" group. If you are in "Registered Users" or a higher group, you will not have been impacted at all by this. This targeted only to accounts with zero posts (public posts that is) in the Newly Registered User group. I don't really know any accounts with zero posts that are not in the Newly Registered group unless a mod/admin specifically promoted them. So all other users should not have been impacted by this.